Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: And I will luve thee still, my Dear, While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve! And fare thee weel, awhile! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!

Footnotes

“Tho’” here is an abbreviated form of “though.” The last two lines of the stanza mean: I will come back to you, even if there are ten thousand miles between us. As with many other passages of the poem, these lines can be read in one of two ways. Either the speaker’s hyperbolic declaration is an earnest, if overstated, profession of commitment, or it serves as an ironic skewering of sentimental expressions of devotion, using hyperbole to ridicule that poetic convention.

— Stephen Kernaghan

The addition of “awhile” to this line means that the speaker hopes—or wants his beloved to believe that he hopes—that he won’t be gone for too long. It means: “Goodbye, for a short while.”

— Stephen Kernaghan

In the Scottish dialect, “weel” means “well,” so this line means “fare thee well.” The speaker is saying goodbye to his beloved. If the poem is a genuine expression of love, then it seems the speaker has been forced to leave his beloved by some unnamed circumstances, and this “farewell” is a melancholy one. If the speaker has been disingenuous from the start, this last stanza is an announcement that, as predicted, the feeling of love has passed. Too ashamed to admit this, the speaker leaves by saying that he’ll return no matter what. But, with ten thousand miles of separation, really he won’t be back.

— Stephen Kernaghan

“Wi’” here is an abbreviated form of “with,” but in this context would mean “under” or “from”: the rocks melt from the heat of the sun. This line is similar to the last one in the second stanza: if the speaker is being straightforward and genuine in the poem, this line reads as a hyperbolic statement meant to emphasize his commitment to his lover. If he’s being ironic, this line will read as an absurd over-exaggeration that really implies that love isn’t permanent, that it will pass. In the latter case, the visual image of rocks melting from the heat of the sun takes on an additional metaphorical layer. Under the heat of the sun, the seemingly unburnable rocks melt away; in the heat of passion, the seemingly endless love actually burns up and disappears.

— Stephen Kernaghan

Hyperbole is a literary device in which something is exaggerated for emphasis or humor. Of course the speaker and his beloved will not literally live long enough to see the seas dry up. To readers who take the poem as a simple expression of love, the hyperbole here only emphasizes how committed he is to her. Others, who think the speaker is being more playful and ironic, will take this line as a sarcastic declaration of commitment to his beloved. These readers think that by making such an absurd exaggeration about how long he’ll love her, the speaker is in effect saying: This love will likely pass, even if it feels endless right now.

— Stephen Kernaghan

This line also contains three archaisms. “Till” is a shortened form of “until.” “A’” is an abbreviated form of “all.” In the Scottish dialect, “gang” was once a way of saying “go” or “walk,” though in this context it means the former. So a translation of the line into contemporary English would read: “Until all the seas go dry.”

— Stephen Kernaghan

Like “thou,” “thee” is an archaic second-person singular pronoun, but “thee” is used as the object of the sentence. In the line “So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,” “thou” is the subject. But in “And I will luve thee still,” “thee” is the object of the verb, and “I” is the subject.

— Stephen Kernaghan

This line contains four archaisms—words or phrases no longer used in contemporary English, or not in the same way. The adjective “fair” here means lovely or pretty. “Art” in this context means “are.” The second-person singular pronoun “thou” was once used as a less formal alternative to “you,” which contemporary speakers would say in this context. And “bonnie lass” was a phrase from the Scottish dialect used as a term of endearment to describe a pretty young woman. So a translation of this line into contemporary English might read: “As lovely are you, my pretty girl.”

— Stephen Kernaghan

Like the ballads from which Burns adapted some of the lines in this poem, “A Red, Red Rose” is written in ballad measure, also known as common meter. The rhyme scheme in ballad measure is a b c b. The first and third lines are iambic tetrameter, which means four iambs per line. The second and fourth lines are iambic trimeter: three iambs per line. An iamb is a pair of syllables, of which the first is unstressed and the second is stressed. Ballads like “A Red, Red, Rose” were often meant to be sung; historically, ballads were folk songs passed down from one generation to the next.

— Stephen Kernaghan

Historically, “played” would be pronounced in two syllables, though modern speakers tend to say it in one. Because the “-ed” ending of words used to be pronounced as a separate syllable, poets would sometimes replace the “e” with an apostrophe—“play’d” instead of “played”—to indicate that the word should be collapsed into one syllable. The contraction of the “-ed” ending helps the poet fit words into the meter at hand.

— Stephen Kernaghan

The simile “my luve’s like a red, red rose” is an example of the simplicity that some readers find and appreciate in the poem. The comparison of a lover to a flower is not a jarring or surprising one. However, Burns adds the element of time to this conventional simile, adding that the rose is “newly sprung”—or newly blossomed—“in June.” This suggests that his beloved has not been corrupted by the passage of time. She might literally be young or she might be figuratively fresh in spirit. In addition, the repetition of “red” evokes an ideal redness. The rose symbolizing his beloved is so perfectly red that the speaker has to say it twice.

— Stephen Kernaghan

In the past, English spelling wasn’t standardized in the way it is today, and “love” could sometimes be spelled “luve.” However, by 1794 this spelling was relatively uncommon. It seems Burns intentionally used this unconventional spelling because it was in keeping with the foreign terms and usages that the Scottish dialect introduced, such as “gang,” “weel,” and “bonnie lass.” “My luve,” in this first stanza, is a term of endearment: it refers to the person he loves, not the feeling.